


Four Times Arthur and Merlin worked out (and the one time they didn’t)

by flashindie



Category: Merlin (TV)
Genre: 5 Things, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, M/M, Reincarnation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-26
Updated: 2013-01-26
Packaged: 2017-11-26 22:55:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,306
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/655285
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/flashindie/pseuds/flashindie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Arthur does not have an exceptional rebirth.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Four Times Arthur and Merlin worked out (and the one time they didn’t)

Arthur does not have an exceptional rebirth. 

There’s no parting of the heavens, no godly hallelujah, angels, shining star or virgin mother, instead Arthur is born like most are, bloody and screaming, into a clean room with soiled bed sheets. A midwife hovers, so does a father, and a still-living mother picks him up with trembling fingers. This is how the greatest king of England is reborn. Just like everybody else. 

She names him Arthur purely by coincidence, after the late great king, even if what he inherits is a farm instead of a throne. It’s been twelve years since King Arthur’s death (four months since Merlin’s) and Arthur grows like a child should. Stretches into adolescence and falls into puberty, and he doesn’t think anything of it when his father hires a new stable hand, a skinny, freckled boy named William. 

He thinks even less of it when he falls in love, when working together turns into falling into something together, stumbling through a romance that Arthur had never-- _could_ never have imagined.

Arthur doesn’t have an exceptional rebirth, nor does he live an exceptional life, but it is one free from expectations. Arthur does not marry Gwen, no one betrays him and he lives longer than he ever could have as king. There are no great wars, no disasters, no pain; just a vegetable garden, two cows, and William. 

_Merlin_.

2\. 1940

This time around, they’re somewhere between seventeen and thirty, smeared in dirt, grime and blood. Arthur aches, Merlin bleeds, and it’s not a happily ever after, but it isn’t a _the end_ either.

James struggles to draw breath, fingers grasping over the gaping skin of Henry’s stomach, where a bullet tore through his uniform, skin, muscle like a pen through a sheet of paper, and the ink, blood, poison spills over James’s fingers like water, like his own blood did in Merlin’s hands a thousand years ago. 

“Stop,” Henry mumbles, eye lids drooping over brown eyes, and it takes all of James energy not to cling, not to kiss him in a gutter full of dying soldiers. James shakes, trails blood-soaked hands up Henry’s sides, down his arm until his fingers clench around Henry’s lax ones. 

“I love you,” Henry mumbles, and James clenches his eyes shut, shakes blond hair out of his eyes and rips off his helmet. Leans in, and fuck it, he kisses him. 

Overhead, bullet shells rain, there are yells, screams, crashes and gas fills lungs like they do in concentration camps a hundred miles away. 

They die together in the trenches, hands clasped and cold.

3\. 1962

George doesn’t usually come to these things, isn’t that into the whole get-high-dance-then-circle-jerk scene, but Leslie has promised a lot of substances and an easy lay, so maybe it’s unsurprising that he opens the door to her share house and finds himself at somebody else’s orgy.

“Right,” George says, and promptly ends up in the bathroom where a slight girl with rather large breasts hands him a couple of pills and a paper cup of ale to wash it down with. “Smashing,” he tells her, and she just smiles, giggles and pulls him back into the party.

There are bodies everywhere, bare and somehow raw, honest, and maybe it’s the LSD, or maybe it’s the fact that George is twenty two and horny, but it’s too easy to pull his shirt off, press himself against the back of some pretty, dark haired woman. To turn her around, cup her breasts and kiss her in earnest. He can feel her smile against his lips, feel her pale fingers circle his skinny wrist and suddenly he’s being pulled away again, led through the crowd and up against a wall. She pulls him on top of her, over her, and deftly unclips her bra as she gestures to the boy beside her (and he’s utterly trashed, this one is). 

“This is Art,” she mumbles, and George looks at some pretty, blond boy with eyes that George could probably trip-out on and cocksucking lips that George knows he could get high off, and it’s a few minutes before he realises he already has. 

Art is a stoner, a roadie and a bit of a prick, and George has fucked him before in somebody else’s drug den. They don’t get along unless one of them is on their hands and knees, and George isn’t above kissing the gorgeous, dark-haired woman whilst he pulls Art in with a hand on the back of his neck. _The Beatles_ are blaring from somebody’s record player, and they’re drowned by the sound of the drunken yelps behind him. George might not have even noticed the music, but Art sings along, _we all want to change the world_ , and it’s suddenly the loudest thing in the room, even if Art is hardly the singer he thinks he is. George kisses him, fast and hard and more impassioned than maybe he’d like, just to shut him up, and the dark-haired girl hums in approval. 

In ten years time, Art will say something about free love, and George will say something about fate, and watch Art roll his eyes and flush that perfect, delectable shade of red.

5\. 2006

Martin really is too old for this.

Jude gasps somewhere underneath him, fingernails leaving half-moon crescents on the pale skin of Martin’s shoulders, and he can’t help but groan, cling that much tighter to where Jude arches up underneath him. 

“Fuck,” Jude mumbles, and Martin shivers, thrusts harder and tries to memorise the way Jude’s eyelids flutter, the way his lashes splay to create long shadows against the upsides of his cheeks. He feels sixteen again, like Jude’s his first, like sex is new and exciting, that he’s not too old to be this enthralled, this desperate, _honest_. Like this is just another way of acting out, like all Jude is is a phase, like maybe he isn’t Martin’s everything. 

Because it hurts. Because Martin’s never been a bad man. He loves his wife, his children, his _family_ , but sometimes he feels like him and Jude are something bigger, something _more_. Like the shadows the blinds cast across Jude’s lean-muscled body are worth more than the dark rims beneath Lucy’s – his wife’s – eyes, like the way Jude can switch him on and off is something above Lucy, beyond her. Jude is more than just a man, and Lucy is less than his wife, but it doesn’t make it feel any less like betrayal when he comes home, stinking of sex and booze, to Lucy propped in bed with a book, reeking of soap and baby formula and dinner.

It doesn’t mean he loves her any less. 

At the end of the day, she deserves an answer. She deserves an explanation, she _does_ , when he passes her the divorce papers to sign, when her eyes blur in front of him, and she clasps his wedding ring in the palm of her hand, when she asks, _why?_

And Martin, flushed and breathless and aching, will say the only thing he can. 

“Because I love him more.”

6\. 537

Maybe it’s ironic; that it’s the first time around it doesn’t work.

Arthur is crown prince, and then king and Merlin will always be his servant, even when he’s not. It’s a life of arguments, of _nevers_ and _no’s_ , and the romance is lost in the cracks in Arthur’s armor. Merlin’s fingers linger, and Arthur watches with steady eyes, breaths hitch and pulses quicken. Arthur marries. Arthur is betrayed. Arthur is murdered. 

Arthur is the one that saves Camelot, and Merlin is the one that fails to save Arthur. They fall apart, into chaos and misery instead of each other, and Merlin will spend a lifetime wanting without reward, without purchase, without _Arthur_. 

But just a lifetime.


End file.
